"I don't like the word 'identity' at all, but if we are going to use it analytically, it strikes me that identity has two forms: open and closed. The current culture wars in the U.S. are 'wars' because there is a premium on…"

"These kinds of mobilizations are driven by a social process where the only social advantages are cash advantages and the best route to these is 'class action' type litigation. The effect is extreme formalizatoin of group identity claims…"

Huon Wardle's Videos

Huon Wardle's Blog

Talking Anthropology on the Open Anthropology Cooperative (ning--this website) has been a lot of fun, but all good things come to an end and this will be my last post. The reasons are entirely practical, though not impersonal. OAC here (there is another highly successful and vibrant OAC group on Facebook), has come to the end of what it can reasonably achieve. This website is full up with interesting, but chaotically ordered content and points of contact. It is really a massive hammer to…

If you work as I do on the anthropology of the Caribbean, then Marcus Garvey and Garveyism cast a long shadow. By any standards Garvey's legacy is worthy of reflection. Reading Colin Grant's fine biography gave me pause for thought regarding Garvey and also the excuse to put those thoughts into a review for the OAC. Garvey was the leader of the largest black internationalist movement that has ever existed, but a movement of a unique kind. Most of the internationalisms of the Twentieth…

I came across this demographic today. People in the Mid-West and the North West of the United States drink 'pop'. People who live in the South drink 'coke' and people on the West and East coasts drink 'soda'. Never having spent much time in the U.S. myself I wondered what this might mean. Of course, we have Tocqueville's…

This BBC radio documentary explores the narcocorrido (drug smuggling ballad) as a popular genre among Mexicans in the U.S. Denselow, the journalist points to the ambivalence of the the border in the Mexican imagination. He traces the background to 1848 when the U.S. effectively annexed half of the landmass of Mexico including California. Ballads of…

Thanks for the greeting, Huon. Hello to you too. I hope to contribute to the Joanna Overing discussion in due course... and once I've worked out how to navigate this somewhat confusing site. Alan Passes

Huon, I wrote Keith last night to say that I was taking a break from OAC. I was angry at what I see as the knee-jerk negativity of your responses to my posts in the "Missing the Exemplary" thread. Apparently the ways in which we perceive the world we inhabit and the scholarship that attempts to understand it are so different that there is no possibility of productive conversation based on generous reading. That's too bad. This morning I was tempted to shorten my break by Ken Routon's post on "facts." I hope that we can reach an agreement that I will stay out of threads in which you participate if you return the favor. We both have a lot to contribute to OAC but not, at least for a while, together.

Dear Huon,
Apologies for the request, which probably seemed rather peculiar. The thing is, I just wanted to ask you a question, and couldn't work out how to send it. Sorry about that. It was just a query about the OAC Press.

I just saw your comments on my Fadograph Finnegans Wake page.
I'm looking for a direct email address for you -
Kern and Old Man River show up among other places
in 363.10 Heat wives rasing. They jest keeps rosing. He jumps leaps rizing.
363.11 Howlong!
363.12 You known that tom?
But could certainly be one of the songs of the woods.